


The Significance of Time

by DawnOfTomorrow



Series: The Significance of Touching Series [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Life death and everything in between won't change Madara...but Hashirama can, M/M, Sometimes death allows a do-over, They meet again on the battlefield
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 11:58:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16702111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnOfTomorrow/pseuds/DawnOfTomorrow
Summary: Death is the end. Sometimes, it’s also the beginning. Rarely is it a second chance...but sometimes it is. Hashirama had changed the world, Madara had changed fate itself. They were always going to meet again, always going to collide again, in the way they loved as much even as they craved more from each other, thinking themselves alone in their desires.They met on a battlefield, like they had so often before.Hashirama asked Madara to have a drink with him – and he accepted. It wasn’t a lifetime of love with the other, but then, had that ever really suited either of them? Some dreams were more realistic than others. He wasn’t sure anymore which was which.What he was sure of, was that, as far as deaths went, his second one was better than the first. Strangely, Madara who had already died several more than him, thought the exact same thing about this very last death of his. It would be his favourite, no matter what else would or wouldn't happen after.





	The Significance of Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fourth part of a series of one-shots covering the feelings and dreams of Konoha's founders, featuring different viewpoints, different angles of the same part of the story. All canon-compliant...let's face it, Hashimada is as close to canon as it could be without the two of them doing it on screen.

Death is the end. Sometimes, it’s also the beginning. Rarely is it a second chance...but sometimes it is. Hashirama had changed the world, Madara had changed fate itself. They were always going to meet again, always going to collide again, in the way they loved as much even as they craved more from each other, thinking themselves alone in their desires.

Death didn’t change either of them, but life had. They had spent so many years apart, one aware the other was alive, the other not – it really ought to have mattered more than it did when they met again.

They met on a battlefield, like they had so often before. Madara was burning with too many emotions to even name them all...instead, he called for his friend like he always did...and for the first time ever, he was brushed off in favour of a stronger opponent.

Madara didn’t mind. He got to see something he hadn’t seen before – Hashirama fighting and failing to immediately subdue an enemy other than himself. It yanked on something in his chest as he watched, only dimly aware that there were still others in the war they had been called into after all this time – he knew less time had passed for his childhood friend, he’d been dead far longer after all...but even so, Madara felt like they were back where they began.

Not where they really began, at that riverside, but on the battlefield where a tentative friendship was forged into something longer-lasting, something so strong it eventually grew brittle and shattered...except Madara still held on to the pieces of it, held on to pieces of Hashirama.

He had lost none of his pride in death any more than he had in his reanimation. He was stubbornly following his dream, knowing that one way or another, he would, this time around, see his desire fulfilled.

Either he succeeded in the Infinite Tsukuyomi, in bringing true peace, the kind that allowed for no conflict...or Hashirama would stop him like he had before. It never occurred to him that someone else could be the one to stop him. This time, there would be no second chances, no half-life offered by anyone...and if there was, he’d spit on the offer.

Madara would die, and he would do so with joy.

As always, Tobirama watched. He had realised, of course, unlike his brother, what had happened as soon as they’d come back from the dead. His brother had shared their story with the young Uchiha and the old snake – had even admitted to his feelings for Madara in some fashion.

Tobirama had only been half-listening. The rest of him was basking in the presence of his beloved elder brother...and in the awareness that another familiar chakra signature wasn’t far at all. Hashirama wasn’t a sensor but he knew as well as Tobirama did that Madara too, had returned.

In the end, it would always be that way. Where one went, the other would chase, one way or another. He smirked to himself. Even fate had no say when it came to those fools. Tobirama would do what he always did when they finally reunited with Madara – he would be there, by his brother’s side, and he would watch.

The story he was involved in wasn’t his own after all. He knew well enough that a tale so powerful it treated death and life as mere afterthoughts could only be spun between the two shinobi brave and stupid enough to think the same way.

He had missed decades, but he didn’t doubt that no other such pair existed.

Tobirama had been wrong. Things had changed indeed. There was another pair of such shinobi, and they even had a watcher of their own. A blonde Uzumaki – what an irony – and the Uchiha at whose request they had been recalled. They fought as one, in a way that Madara and Hashirama never did because they had no enemy strong enough to require it.

He had no problem spotting the woman that watched the pair of them. Of course, everyone was looking at them, but only one pink-haired woman was truly watching the same way he was. The melancholy was plain to see, to his eyes anyway. He learned quickly that it was little Tsunade’s student, of all things. She met his eyes and then turned them back to the pair high above them. They truly were a magnificent sight.

Fate really had a strange sense of humour sometimes. Tobirama had turned his attention to the new pair of heroes, the living pair, to aid them in their fight against a monster with more chakra than even his brother.

It had been a worthwhile fight. His successor, the Fourth and his son had great aptitude for the jutsu he had come up with. It...pleased him. It also pleased him to find that Konoha was still strong, his brother’s Will of Fire still undaunted.

The fact that he couldn’t see Hashirama didn’t bother him. He could sense him easily enough, right by Madara. They were both where they wanted to be, neither aware of it. Tobirama smirked as he teleported yet again, delivering an attack against the seemingly invincible monster before them.

Madara and Hashirama did what they did best – they fought. The familiarity of it, the ease of it startled Madara more than it did Hashirama. Madara had spent so much time hating, so much time scheming, he truly had expected more to have changed, had thought it would feel like something new...but he felt the same joy, the same excitement he always had.

Hashirama had expected nothing to be different at all. He didn’t know what Madara had gone through in the time he’d been dead, but he knew more than anyone else just how unchanging Madara Uchiha’s flame was. After a life alone, a life spent empty after killing the man he loved, basking in that warmth once again was...almost more than he could take.

And then, a little later, it was Madara that brought up the last conversation they had had as allies. Reminded him of what he’d said – the closest he’d ever come to telling Madara his real feelings. ‘True happiness can be found when two opposites, two contrary powers cooperate’ he’d said, and he’d hoped in equal parts that Madara would and wouldn’t understand.

He didn’t. Madara had left. Hashirama’s heart had broken just a little.

He hadn’t resented his friend for leaving, but he’d resented himself for being unable to stop him. Hashirama had wanted Madara to put down roots in Konoha, with him, with anyone. That had been his dream after all. He built Madara a village but in the end, the man had looked for something Hashirama couldn’t give – the irony wasn’t lost on him. He’d have done almost anything for Madara...but at least, he reasoned, he got to spend his death with the Uchiha, if not his life.

Kneeling on the ground, with Madara’s fingers around his throat, his power pulled from him by the other, he still didn’t find it within himself to resent the man. He let him be, well aware that he could have tried to stop him if only...if only he didn’t love the man as much as he did.

If only Madara loved him a little more, he thought next.

Of course, he didn’t know that Madara did love him, just as much and even more desperately. His face embedded on the other man’s chest in a sick parody of what they both desired – Hashirama had no choice but to watch as events unfolded.

He could still sense the man’s moves as well as he always had been able to – knew his next step before he did, just like Madara knew his before he could move. Madara fought the tailed beasts, fought them one man against so very many monsters...and it was beautiful, in Hashirama’s mind.

Beautiful and tragic, and not at all what he wanted. He wanted peace, had always wanted peace, but peace without Madara had proven empty, just like he had been empty, in the end. Now he was not – he felt like a part of Madara’s fire had been bestowed unto him, had been shared with him in order to give him the strength he needed to stand tall in the fight against his oldest friend.

Tobirama attacked Madara long before Hashirama was freed from the metal rods Madara had used to pin him in place. He had never expected to see the older man again...to fight him the way his brother always had. In truth, he didn’t. The battle lasted only a few moments before he was defeated, on the ground, looking up at Madara. He was magnificent, even as he took his revenge for his younger brother’s death.

It didn’t bring him the peace he’d wanted, the peace he suspected his older brother would find in his place. That was quite alright with Tobirama. He’d always played a minor role in their play. He was grateful to be part of it at all.

Hashirama gave his chakra to Sasuke Uchiha willingly. Not because the young one was like Madara, but because he wasn’t. Nailed to the ground by Madara, left behind, he still thought of the other man as kind, and it wasn’t because he was blinded by his love.

He knew his younger brother thought he was, but he had mistaken acceptance for unawareness. Hashirama wasn’t blind to Madara’s faults, he simply accepted them as they were. It was all he could ever hope to give the man he thought didn’t want...more.

Even in death, that hadn’t changed.

Hashirama wasn’t TRULY surprised when he watched his friend ascend to all but being a god...nor that there were others who could defeat him even in that state. Madara had been the strongest after him in their time, but on that battlefield, there were many more shinobi equal to them in strength. Madara had always longed for power, had wanted enough of it to defeat Hashirama...and once he had it, he’d looked right past him, had fought stronger and stronger enemies.

He was proud of him, even if...even if it felt like he’d been cast aside a little. Still, Hashirama wouldn’t demand anything of his friend that he wasn’t willing to give. He’d only done that once – when he’d taken the life of the man more dear to him than his own life. 

Hashirama closed his eyes. He only opened them again when that strange light enveloped those around him. He recognised his own power, to a degree, learned later the details of Madara’s plan from yet another god...and he resented that he wasn’t part of it, that he didn’t get to see the sweet nonsense that others had seen, those wonderful fake dreams.

He was, after all, and always had been, a dreamer. 

Hashirama desperately wanted to know what his dream would be. What would the Infinite Tsukuyomi show him? It would be Madara and himself, in Konoha – that much he was sure of. He wondered though, if they’d be old together, or in their prime, waking up together, or perhaps sharing a drink and a laugh? He’d always had too many dreams to count, and never quite enough happiness for himself – not when it came to Madara.

It grated on him that his friend, the one who had shared all his dreams – knowingly or not – would deny him this one.

Being transformed into one of those white abominations wasn’t quite worth it though – even a dreamer like Hashirama preferred the truth of a fight with Madara to the deception of a fake dream in the end. It goes without saying that peace with his friend would be his first choice, but Hashirama had accepted that such a thing was impossible a long time ago.

To find out that Hashirama was a previous reincarnation of the god Ashura...it had shaken him to no small degree, hearing something like that. Strangely, finding out that Madara was Indra’s reincarnation did not have that effect at all. Hashirama had always called Madara a gift from the divine after all – he’d known, without knowing.

In the end, both Hashirama and Madara had died another death. A peaceful one, side by side. Madara had said that neither of them achieved what they wanted...and in a sense, that was true. They had lived more than one dream. Their own, each others...they had built a future, changed the world, changed fate itself, laughed at death, and yet neither had gotten what they longed for more than anything.

The last few moments of their almost-second-life were spent together, speaking calmly in a way they hadn’t done in decades. It was a tender moment – a sentiment unfamiliar to both warriors. They had been kind, angry, they had fought and they had shaken hands, but they had never shown each other tenderness.

The words they longed to speak burned on both of their lips but neither voiced them – the moment too precious to take the risk. Kneeling by the prone body of his best friend, Hashirama settled for something else, something he could say, another extended hand, another prayer to his friend.

He asked Madara to have a drink with him – and he accepted. It wasn’t a lifetime of love with the other, but then, had that ever really suited either of them? Some dreams were more realistic than others. He wasn’t sure anymore which was which. 

What he was sure of, was that, as far as deaths went, his second one was better. Strangely, Madara who had already died several more, thought the exact same thing about this very last death of his.

He had finally given in to a weakness he hadn’t really wanted to resist for years, decades...Hashirama had extended his hand once more, and this time he had taken the offer, in a manner of speaking. It led nowhere, they had no way of sharing the drink that would have made them allies once more, even if there had been time left. 

They’d had time enough already. He had proven himself right – giving in just once meant he would have done it again had they had another chance to repeat the same thing over. Madara was as foolish as Hashirama, in the end.

He smiled as he took his last breath. If he was to meet Hashirama again in the afterlife, and his kind-hearted, foolish, so very foolish, best friend extended his hand again, Madara would take it. A hundred times, a thousand times. No doubt if such an afterlife existed, his friend would already be waiting with a bottle of sake and a laugh on his face.

He’d changed fate, and Hashirama had changed the world...now it was Madara’s turn to change for the man he respected enough to share his dreams with. Life and death couldn’t change him, but Hashirama had always had that power...and Madara was done fighting it.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the last part that follows the actual Naruto Shippuden story-line. So far, everything matched up to the events these two went through - as of the next chapter, that will no longer be the case.
> 
> I'm a sucker for a happy ending, and these two are going to get one in the afterlife - Madara promised Hashirama a drink after all.


End file.
